1. Field of the Invention
This invention in general relates to communication devices and in particular to receivers and transmitters subject to DC interference.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless communication devices proliferating the market place include newer, smaller, more efficient technologies. Wireless telephones are now capable of performing web-enabled services, and packaging for such telephones continues to decrease in size yet have additional user-appreciated functions.
Consumer grade wireless devices have spurred the development of radio frequency electronics with a renewed emphasis on low cost. One receiver architecture which has seen widespread use in consumer wireless devices is referred to as a direct conversion receiver. Direct conversion receivers are simple and inexpensive but tend to have lower performance than the multiple conversion or super heterodyne architectures used in more expensive receivers. One particular problem often associated with direct conversion receivers in the introductions of direct current (DC) offsets in the received signal. Further, low cost transmitters also introduce DC offsets into the transmitted signal. These DC offsets interfere with the desired signal and degrade the receiver performance. Specifically, DC offset can cause adverse impact on user experience in real-time voice application, such as cell-phone voice communication, where retransmissions are not allowed. It is therefore desirable to remove these DC offsets from the desired signal.
Prior art solutions to the DC problems typically only address receiver-induced DC interference. One method of addressing receiver DC interference includes interacting between analog and digital by estimating the DC in digital and removing the DC at analog, where estimating DC interference in the digital domain is based on simple signal summation. Since this simple DC estimation is not accurate, several stages of interaction are needed, which take too much time to converge for real-time voice applications and depends on re-transmission, which, thus reduces the system throughput and increases the latency, thus affects the user experience. Meanwhile, this simple estimation of DC interference in digital domain has low accuracy. This residual DC could create a performance bottleneck for sophisticated data recovery algorithms, which operates after the DC removal. Moreover, in communication systems that operate using bursts of data, time-consuming DC acquisition solutions are frequently impractical because of the limited preamble of the packet.
What is needed is a solution to the DC interference problem for bursty communications systems that does not require retransmissions. Further, a solution that efficiently addresses both transmitter and receiver DC issues without added cost to a system would be especially valuable.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates identical items unless otherwise noted.